“... in and around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling novel The Elective Affinities comes closest. Dennis Wood ends the chapter in which he records the incidents of 1808-9 with the death of Constant’s father in 1812, and an entry in Constant’s diary that followed it: ‘Worked. My father would have been pleased with my book.’ A sad line, since Juste ...”

Michael Wood: ‘Touch of Evil’, 29 July 2015

“... presence as the sour, weary owner of a nightclub and ultimately the conscience of the film; Dennis Weaver’s incarnation of the crazy night man at the desert motel, a prefiguration of Anthony Perkins in Psycho and every other damaged person who ever had to look after a register and hand out keys (Welles writes in the memo of the ...”

Michael Wood: ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’, 4 July 2019

“... off the wall. It’s true that coronets are not everything. There is also money, but that’s it. Dennis Price as Louis, a distant relative of the aristocrats all played by Alec Guinness (eight roles plus another cameo in a flashback), doesn’t at first take his mother’s fantasies seriously. She married beneath her rank, and had to live in Clapham rather ...”

Michael Wood: ‘Mulholland Drive’, 19 November 2015

“... full of ambition, danger and ambiguity. The city is ‘mysterious and apparitional’, as Dennis Lim says in his excellent new book on Lynch, and never more so than in this film.* Luis Buñuel is the great artist of the unflagged dream, the one you recognise for what it is when the character wakes up but not before, as happens repeatedly in The ...”

“... then did Gildon draw his venal quill; I wish’d the man a dinner, and sate still: Yet then did Dennis rave in furious fret; I never answer’d, I was not in debt; If want provok’d, or madness made them print, I wag’d no war with Bedlam or the Mint. Most readers will recognise the importance of antithesis and balance in these lines, but Rogers sees ...”

Michael Wood: The Amazing Thomas Pynchon, 4 January 2007

“... be surprised by the funny names or the animals, since Pynchon’s early fiction had people called Dennis Flange, Rachel Owlglass and Emory Bortz, and in Mason & Dixon there is a considerable speaking role for Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. But here on page 1 is a group of boy adventurers called the Chums of Chance, heroes of a series of jolly books with ...”

Michael Wood: DeLillo, 22 April 2010

“... from a boyfriend in New York. We don’t learn anything about him except that he may be called Dennis, and that he rings the mother up repeatedly, never leaving a message. Is he a stalker, a killer? A knife is found in the desert after Jessie has disappeared, but nothing else, no body. When Finley gets a phone call from someone who doesn’t talk, is that ...”

“... precursors of pain but also harbingers of insanity and messengers of death. He walks through a wood, sees a concrete foundation where a house used to stand, meets an odd-looking man on a bicycle, comes across the dead body of a mole-banal encounters made sinister by his disordered mind: That something was aiming at me began to make me with each step more ...”

Andrew O’Hagan: The Last Tycoons, 3 March 2016

“... to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the moral ...”

“... the bridge from theory to action. As New Left Review, having recently sawn off its liberal dead wood, declared in July 1968, it was the ‘production and circulation of theory’ in the French universities that had led ‘to the greatest mass upsurge seen in Europe for thirty years’. Theory was the new locomotive of history. But this put us on this side ...”

James Wood: Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’, 8 June 2006

“... of raging pig? I had not read Berenson or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard but still I argued. Forgive me, Dennis Flaherty, I had no right to knock you down. I had no right to speak. I knew nothing, had seen sweet fucking all, had never been to Florence or Siena or Paris, never studied art history. At lunch break at William Anglis’s wholesale butchery, I read ...”

Clive James, 15 July 1982

“... achievements, and anyway the incomplete achievements are often the more instructive. From C.J. Dennis, who knew exactly what he was up to and in The Sentimental Bloke did it to perfection, there is much enjoyment to be gained, but little edification about how the Australian lyric poet is to go about squaring his personal upbringing with the cultural ...”

James Wood: These Etonians, 4 July 2019

“... was after political disgrace, looking for a turncoat Hurd, a Pym, a Raison, a Jopling. What was a Wood? We had no family connections, to Eton or anywhere else much. The only reason I was at the school was my mother’s madly aspirant zeal, her Scottish petit-bourgeois tirelessness. My older brother and I were both effectively scholarship boys. He was the real ...”

Dinah Birch: Anglicising the Holy Land, 20 April 2006

“... and politics might imply: The fields from Islington to Marybone To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood: Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood. Blake’s short poem ‘Jerusalem’, peculiarly celebrated as the most English of visions, thinks of Christ among the English, rather than picturing the English as pilgrims to ...”

John Bayley, 25 April 1991

“... a thoughtful study of Hopkins as a decadent poet in Essays in Criticism, quotes in another context Dennis Taylor’s judgment that Hopkins’s mode of poetry reveals the creative vitality latent in speech, where Hardy formalises its banality and obsolescence. Speech patterns are more important than Hopkins’s theories of inscape, instress and so on, which did ...”